


The Adeptus Ministorum

by moreagaara



Series: The Emperor Revived [4]
Category: Warhammer 40.000
Genre: Alcohol, Cross-Post, Cross-Posted on deviantArt, Emperor Revived, Fictional Religion & Theology, Gen, Literature, Originally Posted Elsewhere, Originally Posted on deviantART, Religion, Religious Content, Religious Discussion, Sci-Fi, fan fiction
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-04-16
Updated: 2019-04-16
Packaged: 2020-08-13 16:14:41
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,176
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20177128
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/moreagaara/pseuds/moreagaara
Summary: Did I not instruct...that box five was to be kept empty?Had to.Peep ownership:Games Workshop--Warhammer 40k and relatedMe--the writing and Emprah's name





	The Adeptus Ministorum

**Author's Note:**

> _Did I not instruct...that box five was to be kept empty?_
> 
> Had to.
> 
> Peep ownership:  
Games Workshop--Warhammer 40k and related  
Me--the writing and Emprah's name

_It would be very bad of me to start quoting Phantom of the Opera on these people, _Daenus thought to himself from his perch in the dome of the newest cathedral on some shrine world he’d forgotten the name of. _Very, very bad._

He swung his legs a little, swapping his perspective a few times every second: from where his spirit self sat, high above all the worshippers who sang his praises; to the stained glass window behind the priests instructing said worshippers on the might of both the Emperor and the Imperium itself; to the statue depicting him sitting on the Golden Throne in his power armor outside the cathedral. The trick prevented his headache from getting worse. Unfortunately, it did nothing for his nausea at being on the shrine world in the first place.

Admittedly, that nausea had its roots in the fact that he had specifically told the entire Imperium not to do exactly what they were doing now. He hadn’t let Lorgar get away with it, and he really shouldn’t be letting his people get away with it now. He sighed and leaned back against the marble dome; he really should at least have tried to explain himself to Lorgar…

_No way to change that now, _Daenus thought. _…at least, no way to change that until I figure out where in the Warp Lorgar actually is. The Eye of Terror somewhere, but that’s about as helpful as saying “in the galaxy somewhere”. _At the very least, he wanted to tell his religious brother, the brother who had started the entire Heresy and had been the reason he had been left crippled on the Golden Throne for twelve millennia, about the joke the universe had decided to play on them both.

Maybe they would have that conversation eventually. It was going to be fun no matter what happened; Lorgar had tried to build him something bright and beautiful, and the Emperor had thrown it back in his face. Lorgar had then turned away from his Emperor, his brother though he had not known that—_I should have told him, really should have_—to look for other, better gods, and he had found the Chaos Gods, who were more than happy to accept his worship. And then the Imperium had found the remains of what Lorgar had tried to create and built it themselves according to the instructions Lorgar himself had abandoned.

_Lorgar… _Daenus closed his eyes, trying to imagine starting that conversation. He couldn’t manage it. To be fair, he hadn’t been able to imagine starting that conversation with Guilliman either, and he had shambled something together in the end. Mostly by starting with a single question.

_Do you remember mom and dad?_

Maybe he should do the same with Lorgar. Maybe he could do the same with all his wayward brothers, those who were still alive, at any rate. _And maybe I could turn back time to before I made all those mistakes and try to make better decisions, or wish upon a star and have my brothers never die in the first place._

He didn’t dare bring that up to the priests; they might actually give him the power to do exactly that, and he was wary enough of that sort of thing after he had fooled them all into believing he had the power to summon infinite tequila. The first half dozen or so times he had hidden a bottle of tequila (long since gone to vinegar) and used a sleight of hand trick to make it seem as though it had simply appeared in his hand. Now, though…

He half flickered into visibility and made a grabbing motion at thin air; a bottle of tequila appeared out of nowhere and from nothing in his hand. It even tasted good when he drank it. The only bad part about the situation was that he couldn’t get drunk anymore. _Just one of those things you lose when you’re made into a god, I guess. Just like sleeping and dreaming. And generally having an escape. _By that point, he was once again fully invisible; he glanced down and kept an eye on the congregation from the window, but no one had seen him up in the dome. Or if they had, they weren’t reacting.

Honestly, he had to wonder if they knew he really was there and wasn’t just some graven image. Then he wondered if the priests would want them to know that. He rather suspected—given the shouting match he had had with the priest who was High Lord of Terra—that they would not. The fight had ended when Daenus threw up his hands in disgust and told the priest he could do whatever the fuck he wanted, so long as he left Daenus out of the decision-making process.

~~*~~

_“I am the object of veneration, not the pope! That’s your fucking job; have fun!” he roared at the man. Then he had stormed out of the room and into the Throne room, where he sat down with his back against one side, debating once again whether it would be better to just end the entire cult. Or himself. One of the two._

_Guilliman exercised his power to meet with the Emperor whenever he wanted within a few minutes and sat next to him. The two of them stayed silent for a long while before Daenus offered him one of the infinite tequila bottles. “Pass, but thanks,” Guilliman replied. He could still get drunk, so Daenus drank it instead. “They sprung that on me too, once I was resurrected.”_

_“Yeah?” Mild interest._

_“Seriously. I was awake for about a day and they decided I was a god. Then they said that nothing would do but they had to have a ceremony in which they publicly told everyone.” Guilliman turned to look at him. _

_Daenus barked a laugh. “That must’ve gone well.”_

_“Only reason they lived through it is because they’re more useful as allies than as enemies. Strategically speaking anyway. They just have too much power for me to fight…and they do mean well.” Guilliman raised an eyebrow at him; Daenus did deserve the admonishment._

_He put the empty tequila bottle back to wherever it had come from. “Problem is, I’ve been through this process before. Never made it this far along, but…”_

_“What do you mean?”_

_Daenus sighed. “So on Ancient Terra, it used to be a thing where people would come across some force that couldn’t be controlled. Let’s take lightning for an example. What they’d do is personify that force, give it human-like traits, you know. Bring it down from ‘uncontrollable force of nature’ to ‘something we can understand.’ Then what would usually happen is some psyker of middling power would come along whose personality lined up with the force in their story, and they would say ‘oh, this stranger is the god of lightning,’ and if enough people believed that for long enough…the psyker would become the god of lightning they all said he was.” Guilliman nodded. “Then everyone around him would start telling stories about who he was, what he could do, what he would and wouldn’t do…and those stories would define the god, and therefore the psyker underneath. Yeah, he could disagree, but if enough people believe the stories over what the psyker says for long enough, he would stop disagreeing. Because it w  
ould be true, and the psyker would have no memory of a time when it wasn’t.”_

_Guilliman winced and massaged his forehead. “Well that sounds like a special kind of hell.”_

_“It is. And here’s the fun part. Let’s say the people decide that one day, the god is going to die. Enough people tell the story for long enough, it’s true now. For the sake of argument, let’s say our lightning god will kill a giant serpent, and then die of its poison. If at any point in time the state of the world and those stories line up, well. Those stories will take hold, and the god will die.”_

_“So what happens to the psyker?” Guilliman asked._

_“Depends. If he remembers who he was before he was made a god, he resets to the point he remembers and gets to be mortal again. If he doesn’t…he dies with the god.” The two of them were silent again. “My point is, the gods aren’t the ones with the power in their relationships with mortals. They don’t have free will or the power to change their fate. Their worshippers, the mortals who tell stories about them? They do. They control everything about their god. If they want the god to come, he will. He must. He has no choice.”_

_Another long stretch of silence. “So you were pushing for rationalism and atheism during the Crusade because you didn’t want that to happen to anyone else?”_

_“I figured if I taught everyone that all these great and terrible forces could be directly understood and controlled, they wouldn’t need gods, so they wouldn’t do that to anyone else, yes. As you can see, it worked out splendidly.” Daenus stretched himself out._

_Guilliman thought for a while. “So the reason you can just appear and disappear at will isn’t just the warp-walking thing. It’s that a part of you appears as needed, then disappears when it isn’t.” Daenus made an agreeing noise. “Is anything about you permanent these days?”_

_Daenus had to think about that one. “If there’s a permanent image of me somewhere, there’s usually a piece of my consciousness in it. Especially if people use it as a focal point of their worship. That includes the big gold doors there,” he gestured to the entrance to the Throne room. “There’s still a piece of me in the Throne itself. Still keeping the Astronomican going, still fighting Chaos in the Warp…just like I was doing for the past twelve thousand years. But yeah, everything else is impermanent.” Daenus could feel the gold draining out of his eyes, to be replaced with a dull, flat grey._

_“The only good news about all this is that since every single world in the Imperium goes about worshipping me in a different way—and therefore has different stories about who I am and what I will and won’t do—I get to maintain a level of autonomy that I normally wouldn’t. I can just switch which stories I’m drawing my strength from. Problem is that means there’s only one way for me to stop being a god. I can’t just convince everyone I’ll die somehow through a planted story, then manipulate things so that story actually happens. Even if I go world by world, word’ll get out that I still live somewhere…” he shrugged. “I’ll have to abandon the Imperium entirely. The entire galaxy. I’ll have to take every single thing that has my face on it with me, too. And I’ll have to stay away at least long enough that people stop telling stories about me…”_

_Guilliman was already shaking his head. “They’ll just make up stories that you’ll come back one day. You’d have to stay away forever.”_

_“And then there’s that,” Daenus agreed. “And morally, I don’t think I can do that. It would be wrong to just…abandon everything I’ve worked for. To just leave everyone to their fates, and move on with my own life. Thing is, I’ve done exactly that before…I know I have. So now when I don’t want to, I can’t tell if that’s basic morality talking or me being a god and needed. And call me a depressing fuck, but I think it’s that second one. I think I’m just stuck now.”_

_“…still, neither one of us wants to deal with a civil war,” Guilliman eventually said._

_“Can I get back to you on that?” Gallows humor brought at least a little gold back to his eyes. At least a little warmth back to his voice, at least a little reason to keep going._

_“Okay fine, I don’t want to deal with a civil war,” Guilliman corrected himself. “The last one ended with you stuck on this thing.” He rapped the throne behind them both with his knuckles; it clanged rather like a bell from the power armor he could no longer remove._

_“Fair enough. I’ll…try to be nice to them.”_

_The second meeting with the ministorum priests had gone much more smoothly, partly because Guilliman was invited. It still hadn’t taken Daenus very long to develop what Roboute referred to as a murder smile, but in the end, the High Priest had gotten the point that Daenus really didn’t have an opinion on how he was to be worshipped, and that he would leave hints if there was something he wanted. One of the things that got determined was that if Daenus went somewhere unusual, he would have to bring a priest along._

_It took them months to find someone Daenus didn’t want to uppercut into the nearest sun. _   



End file.
